Supposedly there was a time in human history when reading text out loud was completely normal, and the ability to read silently, (without speaking the words you’re reading) was considered a remarkable ability.
In a related manner, some people don’t have an inner monologue whilst others do. Some people don’t visualise thoughts in their heads and others do. I’m not exactly sure who is doing the thought processes ‘better’ there - arguments could probably be made for either mode being superior maybe.
But I wonder if, based on the above notions, there might be other ways in which humans could just think or do things differently, perhaps better, than we currently do - like with silent reading, the latent capacity to do it is already there, it just needs to be implemented.
These things are no doubt much easier to spot in hindsight than in advance, but the purpose of this thread is to speculate on what, if any, those latent enhanced modes could be.
They don’t necessarily need to be purely cognitive things, for example walking. We pretty much all do that in the same sort of way, but we do it the way we learned as wobbly children. What if there is a different, better way of walking that adults could technically do, if we could just break out of the habits we formed as children?
People who speak tonal languages are more likely to develop absolute (‘perfect’) pitch, though it’s nowhere close to the superpower a lot of folks think it is.
Seems to me that you are in a way asking for ‘unknown unknowns’ which are by definition hard to spot.
Given the number of people alive and the vast spectrum of abilities across a broad range of activities and cultures, I’d have thought that we’d have seen some signs of emergent semi-superhuman capabilities somewhere?
Of course there are fictional abilities like telepathy or telekinesis… but those are fictional to the best of our knowledge.
Interesting line of speculation though: maybe a good science fiction book in it somewhere… though I guess that’s sort of been done a few times…?
I wonder if there have been studies on this?
I would guess that the basic physiological ability is having a very precise memory for frequencies?
Surely connecting this to particular notes must be an aspect learned on exposure to musical instruments: after all, A=440 is just a convention, not a law of the universe.
It would be interesting to hear from anyone who has this ability; I sure don’t, though I have good relative pitch.
This is rather off-topic though: probably should continue in a different thread?
I’m always amazed by the wide range of human ability in regards to running. For some people, running a 5k in less than an hour would be a huge accomplishment. Some people, running 100mi in a day is a thing. Clearly the latter group is superhuman with respect to the former.
I suppose one possibility in relation to reading and writing is that there might be writing systems that convey any amount of meaning at a single glance - English writing can be read one letter at a time, but English readers typically advance to the ability to read whole words at a time, and whole phrases at a time (for example traffic signs with multiple words on them may be familiar enough that they function as discrete units or symbols). Other writing systems might do that to a greater or lesser extent quite naturally, but maybe there are yet-unexploited possibilities.
Supposedly some ideographic languages like Chinese are much more compact than alphabetical ones, though I am not a linguist?
Of course we’re talking about cultural tools here, not biological abilities. In the same way that someone familiar with the positional decimal number system could have seemed like a wizard supercalculator to a person who only knew roman numerals.
Biologically, the question seem to go back to the centuries-old nature vs nurture debate.
Do we really start out as a ‘tabula rasa’ (blank slate) as Locke & Hume seemed to believe, and learn ways of doing things from experience (so that each time, we may happen to learn a better or less good method for each one), or do our brains have innate structure that predisposes us to certain methods of perceiving and thinking?
The answer is always ‘both’, I guess, though human brains do seem to be hardwired for language.
As for walking: it’s a bit amusing to imagine someone discovering a better way… and everyone smacks their forehead and says: “STREWTH! How on earth did billions of people miss this and get it wrong for so many millennia??”
In a vain attempt to bolster my self-image, I often term minor things I can do as “super powers”. Often this comes after being surprised that others can’t do them.
F’rinstance, I got dragged into a family football pool, so all of a sudden I care about EVERY SINGLE NFL GAME. So I watch them, most of them all at once.
While my brother is paying hundreds of dollars for cable and ESPN and Sunday Ticket so he can get split-screen with eight tiny panels showing games, I’m saving money by going to the sports bar that has 20 screens.
And, possibly because I’m ADD, I have no trouble keeping track of all of those at once. A friend joined me one Sunday noon and was visibly upset: “I can’t take it!” So I got us a table where we could only see two screens, but he still didn’t know “where to look, what to watch… I gotta go.”
Yes. I read somewhere that there is a far higher percentage of Mandarin speakers (and presumably, Cantonese) who have musical perfect pitch than those who speak non-tonal languages (like most European or other languages.)
But yes, perfect pitch is no superpower, it’s nothing more than being able to hear a note and recognize whether it’s B-flat or F-sharp, etc. - which isn’t much good except sometimes to impress people.
I once asked a Japanese about this and he assured me that he could write English faster than he could draw Kanji. He had asked me to come to a mathematics lecture he was giving, thinking I might get something out of it (he was wrong), but I noticed that when he wrote on the board, it seemed to take forever to draw the Kanji, so I asked him about that. He had grown up in Japan learning Kanji, not English.
The musicians with perfect pitch I’ve talked to described it as at best moderatly useful, at worst actually annoying. Most said it was no more than an fun party trick.
Some Aboriginal Australian languages have absolute frames of spatial reference. They do not rely on the speaker’s position (left, right, front, behind), but on cardinal directions (north, south, east and west). That means that it’s something humans can do, although most don’t.
There was a brief fad about micro naps: ostensibly people could train themselves to have short (like, 10-20 mins) but intense (if that’s the word) periods of sleep throughout the day which it was claimed would obviate the need for a night’s rest. E.g. a total of maybe 3 hours, which would enable us to have 21 hours of high functioning wakefulness a day thus unlocking a new era of human productivity.
I can’t imagine it’s actually true, but some people do seem to function on a lot less sleep than others, so if there were a way to unlock that then we’d all have no excuse for not getting that novel written.
A rather common trope in science fiction is superintelligent (posthuman?) people who use a special language which has a much higher information bandwidth than existing natural languages, so they can communicate far more quickly.
I don’t know if much research has been done in this area (not a linguist, as I said), but as a networking engineer I suspect that most natural spoken languages have roughly the same bandwidth?
